Present Perfect

Being the forward-looking person I am, I decided it was high time I learned some SCons. A big manual, lots of Wiki notes, not much could go wrong, right ?

Wrong.

The first thing I wanted to do was to write a simple SConstruct file that would basically do the equivalent of this Makefile:

fail:
          exit 1

Can't be hard, right ?

Wrong again.

The manual doesn't mention anywhere I could find how to run a simple shell command *that does not take or generate files*. The manual is full of examples that explain how to build a program from source files, libraries from source files, everything. The Wiki mentions some things about how to make unit tests run (which is what I wanted to do next, since it should just run a shell command for the unit tests), but they all rely on some source being there to be turned into a program.

I tried various approaches, like using the Builder class (but it gets really upset if you don't have sources or results), using the Execute action (but that always executes *while parsing*, no matter what I do, confusing), using the Command action (failing in various ways if you don't have sources), ...

I spent three hours trying various approaches and I could get nothing to work.

If there's someone out there with a little more SCons knowledge, please translate the above simple Makefile into an SConstruct script that should do the same ...

Being the forward-looking person I am, I decided it was high time I learned some SCons. A big manual, lots of Wiki notes, not much could go wrong, right ?...